Scaramucci also told me that, unlike other senior officials, he had no interest in media attention. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” he said, speaking of Trump’s chief strategist. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders kicked off a new press briefing tradition Wednesday by reading a letter from a 9-year-old Trump admirer.

“To remind us a little bit more often about some of the forgotten men, women and children that we are here to serve and that the President is fighting for, we are going to start the White House briefing every once in a while with a letter or an email that we may receive from some of those individuals,” she said at the start of the briefing.

The first letter she read was from a young Trump fan named Dylan.

Sanders later shared a copy of the handwritten note, complete with misspellings, on Twitter.

“My name is Dylan but everybody calls me pickle,” the letter reads. “I am nine years old and you’re my favorite president.”

In the letter, the child goes on to tell the president about their Trump-themed birthday party.

“I like you so much that I had a birthday about you. My cake was the shape of your hat,” Dylan wrote.

Dylan then goes on to ask Trump his age, and how much money he has.

“Dylan, I’m not sure, but I know it’s a lot,” Sanders responded.

Toward the end of the letter, Dylan writes, “I don’t know why people don’t like you.”

President Trump has told senior aides that he has decided to remove Stephen K. Bannon, the embattled White House chief strategist who helped Mr. Trump win the 2016 election, according to two administration officials briefed on the discussion.

The president and senior White House officials were debating when and how to dismiss Mr. Bannon. The two administration officials cautioned that Mr. Trump is known to be averse to confrontation within his inner circle, and could decide to keep on Mr. Bannon for some time.

As of Friday morning, the two men were still discussing Mr. Bannon’s future, the officials said. A person close to Mr. Bannon insisted the parting of ways was his idea, and that he had submitted his resignation to the president on Aug. 7, to be announced at the start of this week, but the move was delayed after the racial unrest in Charlottesville, Va.

...

Mr. Bannon’s dismissal followed an Aug. 16 interview he initiated with a writer with whom he had never spoken, with the progressive publication The American Prospect. In it, Mr. Bannon mockingly played down the American military threat to North Korea as nonsensical: “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”

He also bad-mouthed his colleagues in the Trump administration, vowed to oust a diplomat at the State Department and mocked officials as “wetting themselves” over the consequences of radically changing trade policy.

Of the far right, he said, “These guys are a collection of clowns,” and he called it a “fringe element” of “losers.”

“We gotta help crush it,” he said in the interview, which people close to Mr. Bannon said he believed was off the record.

Privately, several White House officials said that Mr. Bannon appeared to be provoking Mr. Trump and that they did not see how Mr. Trump could keep him on after the interview was published.

Mr. Bannon’s departure was long rumored in Washington. The president’s new chief of staff, John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who was brought on for his ability to organize a chaotic staff, was said to have grown weary of the chief strategist’s long-running feud with Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser.

WASHINGTON — The acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration will resign at the end of the week, according to law enforcement officials, who said he had become convinced that President Trump had little respect for the law.

Tom Price on Thursday in Washington. He resigned under pressure on Friday. Credit Doug Mills/The New York TimesWASHINGTON — Tom Price, the health and human services secretary, resigned under pressure on Friday after racking up at least $400,000 in travel bills for chartered flights and undermining President Trump’s promise to drain the swamp of a corrupt and entitled capital.